Stephen A. Willier earned a doctorate in musicology in 1987 at the University of Illinois where his dissertation was The Impact of the Gothic on Early Nineteenth-Century Opera. He has taught at Arizona State University and at the University of Illinois. Currently he is Associate Professor of Music History at the Boyer College of Music at Temple University, where he teaches courses on the history of opera and music from 1600-1950. He served as Chair of the Music History Department from 1995 to 2005. He has been at Temple since 1989 and in 2000 was awarded the Lindback Award for excellence in teaching.

He has delivered papers at the American Musicological Society in Boston and at the Nineteenth-Century Interdisciplinary Arts Conference in Paris. He regularly undertakes research in London, Paris, Vienna, and throughout Italy. In Philadelphia he has given numerous talks on music and opera to various groups, including a lecture on “Delacroix and Music” at the Philadelphia Art Museum. He is the program annotator for Virginia Opera in Norfolk.

Publications include Vicenzo Bellini: A Guide to Research (Routledge, 2002), and articles and reviews in Journal of the American Musicological Society, Fontes artis musicae, Studi musicali (Rome), The Opera Quarterly, Opera News, Grove Dictionary of Opera, International Dictionary of Opera, St. James Opera Encyclopedia, Music Library Association Notes, Ostinato rigore (Sorbonne, Paris) and Journal of the American Liszt Society. He has completed a biography of the late eighteenth-century castrato Gasparo Pacchierotti.